260611 – CPP and Dark Matter Primer

by Thomas Abshier | Jun 12, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

What Dark Matter Actually Is

An Introduction to Conscious Point Physics

by Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
6/11/2026 

Joelle, this is the conversation we had, written down so you can read it at your own pace, go back over the parts that didn’t land the first time, and have something to hand to the next person who asks. I’m going to walk you through it the same way I did on the phone — from the ground up, no physics background assumed — and this time I’ll finish the part we didn’t get to before your call came in.

By the end, you’ll understand what dark matter is. Not “what we think it might be.” What it is. And you’ll understand why that matters in life beyond physics.

Why I’m telling you this

You know my story: I came to Jesus because of the physics. The conventional intelligent design arguments — fine-tuning, irreducible complexity, the improbability of it all — those are good arguments. I respect them. But they’re conventional, and they haven’t convinced the world’s masses. They argue that there must be a Designer, but they don’t show you the Designer’s hands actually doing the work, moment by moment. It’s a good enough story for believers to strengthen their faith. And some unbelievers, Lee Strobel comes to mind, are moved by this. Often, the committed materialists, the more science-oriented skeptics, and secular atheists believe the questions of existence and evolution can be answered by evolution and relativity.

Conscious Point Physics, CPP, is a theory of physics that came to me gradually over the years since a profound March 1987 high-dose oral cannabis altered state experience. The fundamental insight from the trip was the realization that the universe was composed of points of consciousness originating in the mind of God. These Conscious Points followed the rules He declared in their relationship with each other. The particles moved a certain amount depending on the type of particle and the distance between them. From this simple insight, we derive the behaviors and phenomena that physics observes: particles, forces, and gravity, and it predicts the composition of the spherical halos surrounding galaxies that we call dark matter.

Dark matter is a perfect entry point for being convinced that the universe we perceive as physical reality is composed of Conscious Points. It will be the perfect object lesson, illustrating that matter and energy are manifestations of consciousness’s ability to see itself. It is this insight that begs the question of where the Conscious Point comes from. It comes from the mind of God looking back at itself.

The current state of science is that nobody knows what dark matter is. You’re not a physicist, and you’ve heard of it. It’s a public debate, and it’s a scientific mystery. Scientists have many different ideas about what it might be, but all of them fail. One week it is this theory, and next week it will be another. There is no candidate that meets the criterion of how Dark Matter behaves. It’s all theoretical. It is one of the great open mysteries of physics: we can see its gravitational effects everywhere — galaxies spin too fast, light bends too much, the universe is structured like a giant web — but no one has ever caught a particle of it, and no one can say what it’s made of.

CPP says exactly what it’s made of. And the answer falls out of the theory that explains what particles are, what energy is, why light is both a particle and a wave, and why particles are both waves and particles. It explains what gravity and magnetism are. It explains how particles can turn into photons, and how photons can turn into matter. I didn’t go hunting for a dark matter explanation; it just became obvious when I was writing the intelligent design essay I prepared a couple of weeks ago. CPP explains the Big Bang, the expanding universe, the first few moments of the universe, and now, apparently, Dark Matter. It’s just a natural extension of how the universe formed. looked at what I’d just written about how quark Conscious Points interacted with each other and realized: that’s dark matter. Grok had suggested this a year earlier, but I had not pursued deriving it. When I realized how quark DPs interacted, I realized this could be the missing piece in terms of bringing scientists to believe that God exists, and a scientific discovery that would also change the world.

So here we go, from the beginning.

The two kinds of things that exist

In CPP, there are two foundational kinds of Conscious Points.

First: The movable Conscious Points (CPs). These are the “stuff” of the universe — the actors, the pieces on the board. There are four types:

• a plus electron-type Conscious Point (+eCP)
• a minus electron-type Conscious Point (−eCP)
• a plus quark-type Conscious Point (+qCP)
• a minus quark-type Conscious Point (−qCP)

Every particle you’ve ever heard of — electrons, quarks, protons, neutrons, neutrinos, photons — is built out of these four types and nothing else.

Second: Grid Points (GPs). These are stationary conscious points. These are the background of space itself. This is the chessboard that the pieces move on. Here’s a simple first picture: imagine stacking dice into a big block, and marking every corner where the dice meet. Now throw away the dice and keep only the marked corners. That array of points is something like the grid that underlies space. Each of those points is a GridPoint, a GP.

But the real grid isn’t cubic like dice. The real geometry of space is built on a figure called the 600-cell — a four-dimensional hyper-icosahedron. An ordinary die (a cube) has 8 corners; an icosahedron has 12; the 600-cell has 120 vertices, and inside it you can find exactly 600 tetrahedra. The tetrahedron is a four-sided/four-cornered pyramid shape. My wife, Margo, named the book about all this Tetrahedra All the Way Down. There are 600-cells smaller than Planck’s constant (10^-35 meter) and 600-cells the size of the universe. All of them are composed of tetrahedra.

Two things about the 600-cell worth knowing even as a beginner:

1. It’s four-dimensional. Each grid point has coordinates not just in x, y, and z but also in a fourth spatial coordinate. This fourth dimension is not time — it’s a fourth direction of space. It can’t be visualized in 3D space where we live because we don’t know where to graph the fourth dimension.
2. Its proportions are governed by the golden ratio, φ (phi) ≈ 1.61803399 — the ratio you see in seashells, sunflowers, and classical architecture. The geometry of the 600-cell is filled with φ, and that single ratio, multiplied and combined in lawful ways, generates the predictable numerical relationships that show up throughout the theory’s results.

All of space is densely packed and nested with these 600-cells — small ones, larger ones, side by side and layered, from the center of the universe to its edge. And the Grid Points never move. They are the chessboard. The Conscious Points, the CPs, are the chess pieces. The board is fixed; the pieces move on it.

The rules of the game

The Conscious Points obey the rules God declared. There are nine axioms in the full theory, but for today, you need only three behaviors that are embedded within the 9 axioms.

1. Opposite charges attract, and like charges repel. A plus and a minus pull together; two pluses (or two minuses) push apart. This is the familiar electrical rule.
2. Quark-type points, qCPS, attract each other regardless of sign. A qCP and any other qCP, regardless of charge — plus-plus, plus-minus, minus-minus, doesn’t matter — always attract. This extra attraction is called the strong force in the context of the force between protons and neutrons inside the nucleus, and they call it the color force when talking about quarks attracting quarks. The color force has nothing to do with color; they just made up the name to give it a name. It’s neither; it’s just a rule that quarks move toward each other when they get the message of the qCPs near them. The strong force is the glue that holds atomic nuclei together. The color force is the glue that holds quarks together. The rules of qCP-qCP interaction reflect the underlying reality of this type of force.
3. Every Conscious Point moves by perceiving its surroundings, computing how to respond, and then displacing and moving to the next position the next Moment. This is the PCD cycle: Perceive, Compute, Displace. Every CP, every Moment, perceives the stress of the space around it, computes where the steepest gradient of stress lies (what I call the Space Stress Vector), and moves to a new GP/GridPoint in that direction. This happens about 10⁴⁴ times per second. Time itself is made of these Moments — reality is a succession of PCD cycles, like frames of a film.

Two technical terms you’ll hear me use:

• SSV — Space Stress Vector. A measure of how much “stress” (concentration of charge, energy, activity) there is at a place in space, and in what direction it changes most steeply.
• PSR — Planck Sphere Radius. How far the message from each GridPoint goes out in one Moment. Light travels at one PSR per Moment. Mass cannot go that fast; it can only go a portion of a PSR each Moment. The amount a CP moves in a Moment depends on the sum of the stress it is experiencing. Each stress comes from a different direction. If the stresses are equal from all directions, there is no movement, because the SSV_net is zero. If there is a high net stress at a GP → the CP on that GP takes long steps in the direction of that net stress.  Likewise, low stress →  movement/displacement is a small percentage of the PSR.  When there is a high SSV_absolute in a location, the PSR is smaller, which is why there is space contraction, which produces time dilation. Gravity shows up because the PSR is smaller in the direction nearer another mass.

The movement rule, in plain language: things flow in the direction of where there is the greatest gradient/difference in stress. It is somewhat like moving from a crowded area toward an empty area. That is diffusion, like a drop of ink spreading through water. This is a little different; it’s like a ball rolling off the top of a mountain. It will roll down the steepest side. Each point computes the direction of the steepest change in its current stress.

“Let there be light”

Now, creation.

In the beginning, God created all the Conscious Points that will ever exist — something on the order of 10⁹⁰ of them, an unimaginable number — sit stacked on just thirteen grid points at the center of the universe. All the CPs of the universe sit on one central point and its twelve nearest neighbors. This is one of the twelve vertices of one icosahedral cell around the center in a 600-cell. The CPs are literally superimposed, all sitting atop one another on the same GP. They are perfectly static before the creation began.

Then God said, Let there be light — and the PCD cycles began.

Each point perceived: inward, toward the center, the stress is unimaginably high — 10⁹⁰ points stacked on thirteen locations. Outward from the 12 points on the surface of the icosahedron, beyond the cluster, the stress is zero — there’s nothing out there. The outward-pointing gradient is overwhelmingly steeper than the stress moving toward the center of the icosahedron. So when God said, “let there be light,” and the CPs began to perceive the SSV, and SSV gradient on their GP, they each saw this enormous contrast in SSV coming from the direction where “everything was stacked on top of the local 12 neighbors” and “the nothing, the zero SSV coming from the volume outside the little patch” and the SSV gradient was extreme. The PSR is determined by the absolute SSV at each GP. The PSR changed each Moment, and so the speed of light was variable. The net effect is that the PSR increased exponentially during the first trillion seconds, creating what is called inflation.

This is the Big Bang. This is the period when the CPs took their first major steps after “let there be light.” It is this era that physicists call the inflation era. In CPP, it lasts roughly a trillion moments — about 10¹² PCD cycles, ending around 10⁻³² seconds after the beginning. After that, the superimposition of CPs had stopped, and the contrast relaxed enough that the points settled into ordinary motion: they kept their velocities, like shells fired from a gun, coasting outward ever after. The universe has been expanding ballistically since.

And through all of it, the grid never moved. The board stayed fixed; the pieces flew outward across it.

One more thing about the inflation era, that first trillion moments was a melee, and tiny imperfections — little unevennesses in how the points dispersed — got locked in during inflation. They were microscopic then. But every imperfection laid down in those first moments got stretched as the universe expanded, and stretched, and stretched. That is important for understanding how the universe created the filaments of galaxies and huge voids where there are no galaxies.

The universe freezes out, one bond at a time

Picture the young universe: a furiously hot swarm of plus and minus eCPs and qCPs, all attracting and repelling and colliding. CP pairs form constantly. The qCPs bond as plus and minus pairs to form quark Dipole Particles, qDPS. But the collisions are so violent in the early universe that most pair bonds get broken as fast as they form. Binding can’t stick until the universe cools below the binding energy. Each time the temperature drops past a threshold, a new kind of object “freezes out” and becomes permanent. It happens in sequence:

First freezing — the Quark Dipole (QDP). A +QCP and a −QCP bind. They’re held by both the electrical attraction (plus-minus) and the strong force (quark-quark) — double-glued. Once the universe cools below their breaking energy, QDPs are stable in low-temperature conditions. They break in colliders

Second freezing — the Electron Dipole (EDP). A +ECP and a −ECP bind. Electrical attraction only, so it’s a weaker bond and freezes out later, but once frozen, likewise stable.

Third freezing — the Hybrid Dipole (hDP). A quark-type CP and an electron-type CP bind across families: a +QCP with a −eCP (type A), or a −QCP with a +ECP (type B). Together, types A and B are the hDPs.

Then the hTetra. hDPs carry an exposed quark end, and quark ends attract every other quark end via the strong force. So hDPs lock together — a type A and type B hDP will interlock and arrange themselves into a tetrahedron: the hybrid tetrahedron, or hTetra. Visualize it by forming a U with your thumb and index finger on one hand.  Do the same with the other, and interlock the U from your right and left hands. The 4 tips of your thumb and index fingers are the points of the tetrahedron.  The key fact: an hTetra is more stable than the loose HDPs that formed it, so every HDP in the universe ends up incorporated into an hTetra. There are no free-floating HDPs anywhere — they are swept up and bound as hTetras.

So when the dust settles, space everywhere is filled with three kinds of stable, neutral, bound objects:

• eDPs — electron dipoles
• qDPs — quark dipoles
• hTetras — hybrid tetrahedrons

This is the permanent furniture of space — what CPP calls the Dipole Sea, or DP Sea. It fills the universe, and it will stay this way forever.

Now we watch what happens to the qDPs and hTetras in that list. They aggregate around the imperfections formed during the Big Bang inflation era, eventually forming galactic-sized halos that attract protons and neutrons, which congeal into stars and galactic cores. You have just met dark matter.

Chains, woolly bears, and the cosmic web

Now we build a structure.

A qDP has a plus end and a minus end. So when another qDP drifts by, its minus end can latch onto the first one’s plus end. This process continues, forming a plus-minus, plus-minus, plus-minus chain. And these chains aren’t held by mere electrostatic attraction — every link is also strong-force-bonded, qCP to qCP, double-glued. QDP chains are tough.

Now the eDPs floating everywhere look at this chain and see exposed pluses and minuses all along the qDP chain. An eDP swings its minus end to weakly bind to a plus qCP on the qDP chain.  The plus end of the eDPs weakly bonds to the minus qCP. More than one eDP end can bind around the circumference of each qCP in the qDP chain.  This creates a coating around the entire qDP chain, preventing clumping and forming what is called a glueball. The chain grows a thick, fuzzy coat of EDPs, like the caterpillar we call a woolly bear. It’s also like the bar magnet bristling with iron filings. The qDP chain is a long, wiggly, fuzzy strand.

And remember those imperfections locked in during inflation? These chains are the imperfections that have grown up. As the universe expands, the strands get stretched — and more EDPs keep settling into the coat as it stretches — and stretched again, until structures that began at a subatomic scale, 10⁻²⁰ meters, have been drawn out to 10²⁰ meters: tens of thousands of light-years. They kept their shape from when they were small. The thread-like pattern laid down in the first trillion moments is now written across the sky.

Have you seen those pictures of the universe at the largest scale — galaxies arranged not randomly but along filaments, like a vast spiderweb? Astronomers call it the cosmic web, and nobody in conventional physics can tell you why the universe is webbed rather than smooth. In CPP, it’s obvious: the web is the stretched-out qDP chain network. The filaments are woolly bears writ large, with galaxies forming around those qCPs in the qDP chain that attracted other smaller qDP chains, developing what became the spherical galactic halos that attracted mass that congealed into stars and galactic cores.

The gathering: nucleation points

Here’s the next move, and it’s the heart of the dark matter story.

Not every qDP got woven into a chain. And remember, there are hTetras out there too, drifting free, probably as chains, depending on the environment’s temperature. But every one of them carries strong-force attraction points. The qCPs embedded in those chains are powerful strong-force attractors. So the free qDPs and hTetras migrate. But they don’t turn into a single round dense all-qDP mass ecause they are prevented from getting too close by the woolly-bear coat of eDPs surrounding the qDP chains. The qDPs crowd in as close as they can, up to a maximum density at the center, but fairly uniform in density across the galactic diameter. They gather around the knots/nodes form in the early universe, and form a chain network of globs of qDPs and hTetras that become the galactic halos.

Over cosmic time, this sorts the universe into two kinds of regions:

• Around the chain knots: dense gatherings of QDPs and hTetras — every quark-bearing object in the neighborhood has been drawn in. These are the nucleation points.
• Everywhere else: In the interstellar space, only eDPs exist. The empty stretches between filaments hold no quark-type matter at all — it has all migrated to where the attraction is.

What gravity is

Now it is time to talk more about what gravity is in CPP. This is important because the qDP chains and hTetra chains are drawn toward the galactic DM halos.

Remember the PSR — the distance a Conscious Point moves each moment, shorter where stress is high, longer where stress is low. Now, picture a particle sitting near a dense region. On its dense side (the side closer to a mass), space is stressed more: short steps. On its empty side, space is relaxed: CPs take long steps in their thermal random walk in the outer region. Therefore, Moment after Moment, each CP in the DP Sea (or inside the mass) takes long steps in one way and short steps the other — and the net effect is a steady drift toward the dense region.

That drift is gravity. Gravity isn’t a separate force that has to be added to the theory; it’s the automatic consequence of the PCD cycle operating in a stress gradient. Mass concentrations create stress; stress shortens steps on the near side; everything nearby drifts in.

So those nucleation-point gatherings of qDPs and hTetras that form the galactic halos are regions of high mass density and high SSV (compared to the low density of the intergalactic space). Therefore, the galactic halos of DM are gravitational wells. The massive qDP and hTetra chains are not buffeted by collisions with comparable-mass objects in the thermal soup of the DP Sea; thus, their migration toward the galactic halos is unimpaired. The eDPs cannot migrate toward the galactic halos very quickly because they are high in number, small, and are dispersed by thermal collision.

Quarks, in brief — and why it matters here

To finish the picture, I need to tell you what ordinary matter is, because ordinary matter is the stuff that falls into those wells. I’ll keep this short — it’s a whole conversation of its own. It involves mass, spin, Zitterbewegung oscillations, and the origin of neutrinos.

A quark is what you get when a free, unpaired qCP gathers a cloud around itself. Take a lone +qCP: every nearby qDP orients its minus end toward that central plus qDP. The presence of the unpaired +qCP forms a polarized cloud. In addition, a passing qDP gets captured into orbit around this central qDP and polarized cloud assembly. That captured tangential velocity qDP begins to orbit, which gives the quark its characteristic spin that all fermions have (objects with 1/2 Planck’s constant of spin). That object — central +QCP, polarized QDP cloud, orbital QDP — is an up quark. This is the simplest quark.

A down quark is an up quark that has captured an electron. The electron’s central −eCP dives to the heart of the quark and sets up a perpetual in-and-out radial oscillation (called Zitterbewegung — “trembling motion” — ZBW for short). And the electron’s now-surplus orbital EDP spins away free: that spinning EDP is an electron neutrino, which is why neutrinos fly off whenever a proton captures an electron. The conversion of the up quark to a down quark converts the proton (Up UP Down quark) into a neutron (Down Down Up quarks). Nobody in conventional physics can tell you what a neutrino is. In CPP the electron neutrino is simply a spinning eDP.  A spinning qDP is a muon neutrino, and a spinning hTetra is a tau neutrino.

One of the principles of fermionic mass formation is that all charged fermionic masses form around free, unpaired charges. A lone plus or minus will polarize the DP sea around it. The free qCP or free eCP will polarize DP clouds around it, drawing them closer and thereby creating a condensed region of ordered eDPs and qDP chains. This condensation and ordering of the DP Sea is what energy is. That condensed order of qDPs and eDP and h Tetras compose the mass of a particle. The bound, paired-up Sea objects — eDPs, qDPs, hTetras — have no exposed/naked/unpaired CPs that will polarize and condense to form a mass. This is why the qDPs and eDPs stay in the quiet background.

Baryons: three quarks on an hTetra

Here’s the part we didn’t get to before your call arrived.

A baryon is a particle made of three quarks. The two baryons that matter are the ones you’re made of:

• a proton = two up quarks + one down quark
• a neutron = two down quarks + one up quark

And here’s how the three quarks hold together: they assemble on an hTetra. The hTetra — that little tetrahedron of interlocked hybrid DPs — serves as the structural scaffold, its two strong-force vertices and two electric-only charged vertices anchor the three quarks into a single bound particle. The quarks have an open eCP vertex. The proton is a +eCP at its open vertex, and the neutron has a -eCP at its open vertex. The hTetra and qDP chains are the background Sea of DM composing galaxies. The hTetra is also the skeleton inside every proton and neutron in your body. (Here we see another example of the  fact that the universe is composed of tetrahedra all the way down.)

Baryons form by accidental collisions between the open vertex of quarks and hTetras. As the universe cools, quarks and hTetras collide and bond when properly oriented.  If the energy of the thermal bath of the DP Sea is lower than the bonding energy of the quark-hTetra bond, then the quark-Tetra bonds remain stable. In the right orientation, a proton forms. The two up quarks and one down quark bind to the vertices of an hTetra to form a proton. Two down quarks and one up quark bind on the open vertices of the hTetra to form a neutron. This depends on the open vertex of the charged quark and its ability to bond to the charges on the vertices of the hTetras. The point of all this is to justify that protons and neutrons are massive objects – concentrations of CPs that will not be hindered in their migration by collisions toward the massive objects, such as planets, stars, galaxies, and halos of Dark Matter. The baryons (protons and neutrons) formed in the early universe and were scattered somewhat uniformly through vast expanses of space when they were formed, but the baryons were attracted to the Dark Matter halos, which accumulated sufficient baryonic mass to form stars and eventually galaxies.

The reveal

Now all the pieces are in place. We can see what Dark Matter is, how it nucleated, how it accumulated, how it attracted baryonic mass, and how it became the womb of the galaxy.

Dark matter is the aggregation of qDPs and hTetras in the region of the galactic halo.

That’s it. That’s the answer to one of the biggest open mysteries in physics. The qDPs and hTetras froze out in the early universe, formed chains, and other qDPs and hTetras, and toward these points of strong-force concentration. The chains spread, and each of the qCPs along the qDP and hTetra chains became knots of qDP and hTetra accumulation along the stretched chain network. The knots eventually became the halos of dark matter, which are the wombs of galaxies.

This checks out against the criteria that astronomers actually observe:

Why does it gravitate? Because qCPs on the chain of early forming qDP and hTetra chains are nucleation points that attract more qDP and hTetra chains from their local environment. The first chains formed during the inflationary epoch serve as nucleation points for qDPs and hTetras.  As the DM volume increases, its gravitation increases. The increase in gravitational force attracts mass more strongly, resulting in a more rapid accumulation of DM. The Dark Matter underlying galaxies is simply concentrated regions of qDP chains and hTetras. Again, the tiny regions of qDP chain asymmetry in the early universe, formed during the inflation era, attract qDP chains and hTetras from the surrounding space. The regions of high qDP concentration become regions of higher qDP concentration. Regions of high qDP concentration create SSV gradients relative to regions with lower qDP, hTetras, and eDP concentrations, resulting in a greater gravitational gradient. The qDPs and hTetras drift toward the DM concentrations faster than the eDPs due to a high thermal-collision differential. The qDPs and hTetras migrate downward; the eDPs are slowed by thermal collisions and do not migrate. This creates a region of space with a depleted population of qDPs and hTetras. This results in the two distinct regions: the intergalactic region with high eDPs, and the intragalactic/DM halo regions with high qDPs and a high Tetra chain population.

Why is DM dark? The qDPs and hTetras fill and contribute as the medium of light conduction through space. It does not interact with light because it is the light-conducting medium. It is denser than intergalactic space, being qDPs and hDPs, so it refracts light, but it does not glow, and you cannot bounce photons off of it.  A QDP or hTetra has every plus matched to a minus, every quark end locked to another quark end; there is no energetic release or absorption that makes it glow or block light. It is homogeneous, so it does not scatter. DM has no property that allows it to shine, nothing to absorb, nothing to scatter. It gravitates, and it does nothing else you could see. That’s the exact observed signature of dark matter. Conventional physics has no particle that behaves that way. The qDP and hTetra are not in the conventional physics glossary.

Why does every galaxy sit inside a dark matter halo? Because the order of events of its formation is as follows: dark matter gathers first, and gathers mass around the nucleation points under the influence of the strong force as the universe expands. Then the baryons formed throughout the universe as the temperature dropped, and they were attracted to the DM gravitational wells. Protons and neutrons rained into the QDP/hTetra clouds, gas pooled, stars lit, galaxies grew — each one cradled inside the dark-matter gathering. The visible galaxy is the bright sediment at the bottom of an invisible well.

Why do galaxies line up along a cosmic web? Because the nucleation points sit on the stretched QDP chain network, the inflated remnant of imperfections from the first trillion moments. The web in the sky is the fossil of the universe’s first instants.

Four mysteries are answered by the theory’s already-contained structure. Dark matter arises as simply another natural configuration of the 4 CPs that form mass, energy, gravity, photons, and quantum mechanical phenomena. Conventional cosmology has had to resort to inventing undiscovered particles to fill the gap. The qDPs and hTetras were already there, demanded by the freezing sequence. I just hadn’t thought about the fact that the qDPs and hDPs will not remain independent because of their strong charge, and had not thought about the fact that they would be covered with eDPs to prevent them from compressing into a galactic-sized glueball until I was writing the Intelligent Design paper a couple of weeks ago.  When I saw that, I immediately recognized this as the bridge between conventional physics and the metaphysics of the Conscious Points, and that the Mind of God is the origin of the Conscious Points, DM, and the rest of the visible/physical universe.

Why you can trust this — and why it matters

Lots of people have theories. Why take this one seriously?

Because CPP doesn’t ask you to take it on my say-so. The discipline of the program is zero-parameter prediction: we derive numbers from the axioms — no knobs, no fitting, no adjusting constants to match the data — and we check them against what’s measured. As of this writing, the program has made over a hundred such predictions, which are publicly registered. Every paper goes through adversarial review by a panel of independent AIs before release — ChatGPT is the toughest of them, and nothing ships until it signs off — and then gets posted to the Open Science Framework (OSF), the public registry conventional science uses, where each paper receives a DOI: a permanent, timestamped record. The line goes in the sand in public. The public-facing versions live at hyperphysics.com.

No single prediction proves a theory. But every independent, successful prediction multiplies the implausibility of the axioms being wrong. One hit could be luck. A hundred hits from nine axioms and no free parameters is not luck — it’s a fingerprint.

And whose fingerprint? That’s the real point: the fundamental entities of this physics are conscious points — perceiving, computing, obeying declared rules with perfect fidelity, 10⁴⁴ times a second, everywhere, forever. The universe runs on something that perceives and obeys. Matter is, at bottom, mind under authority. When this physics succeeds — when it explains what Dark Matter is, where the cosmic web came from, what a neutrino is, things conventional physics openly admits it cannot explain — it isn’t just winning a scientific argument. It’s evidence of the kind the modern world says it wants. The problem is that it goes in a different direction from the fundamental stance of Conventional Physics, which holds that the universe is only material. There is no pathway for adjudicating metaphysical claims. In fact, such offerings are usually ignored as being unscientific. This is different because it bridges the physical and the metaphysical and makes the plausibility of the universe being non-conscious an increasingly untenable proposition. As this theory goes mainstream, the proposition that God exists, that matter is composed of Consciousness, that the origin of consciousness is consciousness, and that there is a mind that encompasses the universe and from which it arises will become common knowledge. This will change people, society, and culture. It is the sea change that must happen before the world fractures in its ego/animal-obsessed passion to satisfy the desires of the flesh. With that new paradigm, that the God of the Bible is the origin of the consciousness that underlies the substance of the world, men will regulate themselves according to the rules of divine pleasure, and society will organize around these principles, and the earth will migrate/purify toward a society that is on earth as it is in heaven. Eventually, everyone will know that the foundation of the physical reality is the mind of God, sustaining every moment by His word.

I came to Jesus because I saw in a moment the implications of the metaphysics and the mature development of the physics that is now here, 39 years later. My prayer is that this work opens that same door for many. The work ahead of us is first to win the scientific community’s careful eyes, and then to tell the world.

We’ll keep going from here. Next conversation: spin, the ZBW dance, and the neutrino story. Call anytime.

— Thomas

Quick reference — the cast of characters:

260611 – Teshuvah – Returning Home

by Thomas Abshier | Jun 11, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Teshuvah: The Turning Toward Home

Fellowship Discussion Essay | June 11, 2026

Occasion. In the June 8 essay on why Jews do not accept Jesus as Messiah, the atonement section had to move quickly, and it named teshuvah in a single clause — one item in the list of mechanisms (prayer, study of Torah, charity, teshuvah) by which Judaism carried the weight of atonement after the Temple was destroyed in AD 70. The essay made the Christian claim that “the Hebrew Bible itself does not propose teshuvah as a complete replacement for substitutionary sacrifice” and then moved on, because a listicle of ten points does not leave room to linger on any one of them.

But that clause is not a side issue. It is the hinge of the whole atonement disagreement between Jews and Christians, and teshuvah is far too beautiful — and far too central to the interior life of Judaism — to be left in a list. So this essay stops there. I want to do three things that the earlier essay could not. I want to present teshuvah at its fullest and most beautiful, the way a faithful Jew would present it, with the strongest possible case that the turning is enough. I want to state, precisely and without caricature, where the Christian disagreement actually falls — which is not where most Christians think it falls. And I want to locate teshuvah inside the fellowship’s own ontology, where it turns out to be not a foreign doctrine at all but the native Hebrew name for the very thing we are always talking about: the return of the conscious will to the God in whom it lives and moves and has its being.

This is a doctrine we should love before we disagree with it. Most of what follows is praise. The disagreement, when it comes, is narrow, and I will try to make it exactly as narrow as it really is.

I. The word, and why “repentance” is the wrong translation

Teshuvah comes from the Hebrew root shuv (שוב), which means simply to turn, to turn back, to return. It is one of the most common verbs in the Hebrew Bible, used hundreds of times for the most ordinary kinds of returning — a traveler returning home, a borrowed object returned to its owner, water returning to its channel, the dove returning to the ark. When the prophets take this everyday word and apply it to the soul’s movement toward God, they are not reaching for a specialized religious term. They are saying the most natural thing in the world: come back.

This matters because the standard English translation — repentance — carries freight that teshuvah does not. “Repentance” comes through Latin paenitentia, and behind it stands a whole apparatus of penance, satisfaction, contrition as a kind of self-punishment, the doing of acts to work off a debt of guilt. Some of that apparatus is defensible, and some is not, but none of it is in the Hebrew word. Teshuvah is not primarily about feeling bad, nor is it about performing acts to discharge a penalty. It is about direction. The sinner is a person who has turned his back on God and is walking away from God. Teshuvah is the moment he stops, turns around, and starts walking home. It is, at bottom, a doctrine about geometry — the geometry of a will that has pointed itself in the wrong direction and is now pointed back toward its source.

Keep that geometry in mind. It will matter at the end, when we ask what the fellowship’s own framework says about the structure of reality. The Jewish doctrine of teshuvah and the fellowship’s account of sin and return are, at the level of geometry, the same picture.

II. Teshuvah in the Hebrew Bible

The doctrine is not a rabbinic invention layered onto the text after the fact. It is the great refrain of the prophets, who say one thing to Israel above all others: return.

Hosea ends his book with it: O Israel, return unto the LORD thy God; for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity. Take with you words, and turn to the LORD (Hosea 14:1-2). Joel makes it the center of the call to repentance: Therefore also now, saith the LORD, turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning: and rend your heart, and not your garments (Joel 2:12-13). Jeremiah hears the LORD pleading with a wandering nation as a husband pleads with a wife: Return, thou backsliding Israel, saith the LORD (Jeremiah 3:12). Malachi puts the reciprocity of it in a single line: Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the LORD of hosts (Malachi 3:7); Zechariah says it almost identically (Zechariah 1:3). Lamentations, out of the rubble of the first Temple, turns the whole posture into a prayer: Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the LORD (Lamentations 3:40).

Two passages deserve to be drawn out, because they carry the doctrine’s deepest theology.

The first is Ezekiel, who gives teshuvah its most radical and most personal statement. Against any notion that guilt is sealed and fate is fixed, Ezekiel insists that the door is always open, in the present tense, to anyone: But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die (Ezekiel 18:21). And he grounds this not in a divine concession but in the very heart of God: Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live? (Ezekiel 18:23). He says it again, even more starkly, in chapter 33: As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel? (Ezekiel 33:11). This is the engine of the whole doctrine. God does not stand at a distance hoping the sinner stays away. God wants the return. The whole posture of heaven, in Ezekiel, is the posture of a father scanning the road.

The second is Deuteronomy 30, which contains a detail the casual reader misses. Moses tells Israel that after the curse and the scattering, thou shalt return unto the LORD thy God, and shalt obey his voice (Deuteronomy 30:2) — and then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity (30:3). The same verb, shuv, is used for both movements. Israel turns to God; God turns to Israel. There is a double turning built into the text, and the order is suggestive: the human turning and the divine turning are bound together, two halves of one reconciliation.

And then there is the line that, more than any other in the Hebrew Bible, opens the door to the deepest question this essay will raise. It is in Lamentations, and it is recited in the synagogue to this day when the Torah scroll is returned to the ark: Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old (Lamentations 5:21). Read it slowly. Turn thou us — the turning is asked of God. And we shall be turned — only then does the human turning follow. Even teshuvah, on this verse, is something God must first work in us before we can do it. The return is asked of the One we are returning to. Hold that verse. It is the seed, planted in the Hebrew Bible itself, of everything the gospel will later say about grace going before the will.

III. Teshuvah in Rabbinic Judaism

What the prophets sang, the rabbis built into a complete doctrine of the spiritual life, and it is one of the genuine glories of the Jewish tradition. No honest Christian engagement can proceed without first admiring it.

The rabbis taught that teshuvah was among the things prepared before the creation of the world (Nedarim 39b) — that is, repentance is not an emergency repair God improvised after humanity fell, but a possibility woven into the structure of reality from the beginning. Before there was a sinner, there was a way home. “Great is teshuvah,” the Talmud says, “for it reaches the very Throne of Glory” (Yoma 86a). And in one of the most startling claims in all of rabbinic literature, the sages held that in the place where the penitent stands, even the wholly righteous cannot stand (Berakhot 34b) — the one who has fallen and returned occupies higher ground than the one who never fell. The fall, redeemed, becomes an ascent.

Maimonides codified the anatomy of teshuvah in his Hilchot Teshuvah, the Laws of Repentance, and his account is demanding and precise. True teshuvah has parts: the abandonment of the sin, genuine regret for having committed it, verbal confession before God (vidui — and note, confession in Judaism is made directly to God, not mediated through any priest), and a settled resolve never to return to it. For sins against another person, none of this avails until one has gone to the wronged party, made restitution, and sought their pardon — Yom Kippur itself, the Day of Atonement, does not cover sins between a person and his neighbor until the neighbor has been appeased (Mishnah Yoma 8:9). And Maimonides defines complete teshuvah with a stringency that ought to humble every Christian who imagines Jewish repentance is a formality: complete teshuvah is when a person finds himself in exactly the same circumstance in which he once sinned, with the same opportunity and the same desire, and refrains — not from fear and not from weakness, but because he has truly returned.

This doctrine has a season. The Days of Awe — the ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur — are the appointed time of return, when the liturgy turns the whole community toward self-examination and the work of turning. At the height of that liturgy stands the prayer Unetaneh Tokef, with its famous declaration that teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah — repentance, prayer, and charitable righteousness — avert the severity of the decree. There is the triad of the June 8 essay named: this is where it lives, and it is not a cold mechanism but the beating heart of the most solemn worship in the Jewish year.

And there is one rabbinic moment that matters more than any other for our subject, because it is the exact hinge on which post-Temple Judaism turned. The Temple lies in ruins. Rabbi Yehoshua looks at the wreckage and cries out that the place of Israel’s atonement is destroyed. And Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai answers him (Avot de-Rabbi Natan 4): Do not grieve, my son. We have another atonement as effective as this — deeds of loving-kindness, as it is said, “I desired mercy, and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6). That sentence is the founding charter of rabbinic Judaism’s theology of atonement without a Temple. When the altar fell, the rabbis did not despair; they located the essence of atonement in the turning of the heart, which they argued God had always desired more than the blood of bulls — and they had a verse from the prophet himself to prove it.

We must take that move seriously, because it is serious. It is the strongest form of the Jewish case, and I will state it now in its full strength.

IV. The strongest Jewish case: that the turning is enough

A faithful Jew, hearing the Christian claim that teshuvah cannot replace blood atonement, would answer something like this — and the answer has real force.

You Christians, he might say, have misread your own Bible. You read the sacrificial system as a transaction — a debt of guilt that must be paid, a divine justice that must be satisfied by the destruction of a victim, so that without the payment, no forgiveness is possible. But that is not what the sacrifices were. They were never a payment that bought off an angry creditor. They were the divinely appointed expression of teshuvah — the concrete, embodied enactment of a heart already turning home. The sacrifice was the outward form; the turning was always the substance. And the Hebrew Bible says so, again and again, in its own voice.

I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings (Hosea 6:6). Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams (1 Samuel 15:22). For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise (Psalm 51:16-17). Wherewith shall I come before the LORD? . . . will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams? . . . He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:6-8). Isaiah opens his whole book with God recoiling from sacrifices offered by unturned hearts: To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? . . . Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings (Isaiah 1:11, 16).

The witness is overwhelming, the Jewish argument runs. The Hebrew Bible’s own prophets place the turning of the heart above sacrifice and treat sacrifice as worthless without it. God is not a creditor who must be paid before he can forgive. God is a Father who forgives freely the moment the child turns home — exactly as Ezekiel says, exactly as the father in your own gospel does. When the Temple fell, nothing essential was lost, because the essence was never the blood; the essence was the return, and the return survives the altar. If anything, the loss of the altar purified Israel’s worship from the literalism the prophets had been warning against for a thousand years.

That is the strongest Jewish case, and the fellowship should feel its force fully before answering it. It is not a weak argument made by people who have not read carefully. It is a powerful argument, grounded in the prophets, made by people who have read more carefully than most Christians ever will.

V. The two problems of sin, and what the turning cannot do

Now the Christian disagreement — and here is where it actually falls, which is not where most Christians put it.

The Christian disagreement is not that repentance does not matter. It is not that teshuvah is a Jewish error to be replaced by Christian grace. Any Christian who says “the Jews have works, we have faith” has misunderstood his own faith catastrophically, because the gospel begins with the very same word. Nor is the disagreement that God is an angry creditor who must be paid before he can love — the cruder versions of Christian atonement theory deserve the Jewish critique, and the fellowship does not hold them.

The disagreement is narrow and precise, and it concerns a distinction between two different problems that sin creates.

The first problem is subjective. My will is turned away from God. My heart is set on lesser things. My relationship with the One in whom I live is broken from my side. This problem is healed by turning — by teshuvah. When I turn back, the subjective breach is closed. On this, Jew and Christian agree completely, and teshuvah is exactly the right and sufficient remedy.

The second problem is objective, and it is the one teshuvah cannot reach. Real guilt has been incurred. The moral order — which is not an arbitrary rule but the very nature of God, the structure of reality itself — has been violated, and the violation is a fact about the past. The soul that sinneth, it shall die (Ezekiel 18:4). The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). Here is the difficulty, stated as plainly as I can: my turning today reorients my will, but it does not reach backward and undo what was done. A debtor who reforms his spending habits has done something genuinely good and genuinely necessary — but his future thrift does not pay yesterday’s debt. Future obedience cannot retroactively cancel past guilt because the two operate in opposite directions in time. Teshuvah turns the will toward home. It does not, by itself, settle the account that was opened when the will was turned away.

And this is precisely why the Hebrew Bible holds both things at once — why the prophets who exalt the broken heart never abolish the altar. The same Torah that records God’s delight in mercy over sacrifice also says, with no qualification: For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul (Leviticus 17:11). The honest reading is not that one of these cancels the other. The honest reading is that they are ordered. The sacrifice without the turning is an abomination — Isaiah 1 is right, the prophets are right, a blood offering from an unturned heart is worthless. But the turning was never meant to bypass the altar; it was meant to arrive at it. Teshuvah is the heart’s movement toward the place of atonement; the atonement is what happens when it gets there. Mercy over sacrifice means the heart must be in it — not that the heart replaces it.

So the Christian says: teshuvah is necessary, beautiful, demanded of every soul, and exactly as central as the rabbis say. But it is the human half of a two-sided reality. The other half — the actual covering of guilt, what the Hebrew Bible calls kapparah, atonement — is something God provides, not something the returning sinner generates from within himself. In the Torah, God provided it through the altar. The Christian claim is that the altar was never the final thing; it was a sign pointing forward to a single, sufficient atonement that God himself would provide.

And note what this does to the Jewish objection that God need not be “paid.” The fellowship agrees: God is not paid. The cross is not God being bought off. It is God paying — God himself, in the person of the Son, providing the atonement at his own cost. It is not divine justice overriding divine mercy; it is the place where, as the Psalmist longed, mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other (Psalm 85:10). The whole point is that the One offended is the One who provides the covering. That is not the logic of a creditor. It is the logic of a Father who will not pretend the wound is nothing, and will not make the child pay for it either, and so pays for it himself.

VI. The gospel keeps teshuvah and completes it

When the gospel arrives, it does not abolish teshuvah. It opens with it. The first recorded word of John the Baptist’s preaching, of Jesus’s preaching, and of the apostolic preaching at Pentecost is the Greek word metanoeite — repent, turn, change your mind and your direction. Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matthew 4:17). Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out (Acts 3:19). Metanoia is teshuvah in Greek dress. The New Testament does not move past the turning; it stands the whole gospel on it.

The clearest proof that the gospel honors teshuvah is that the most beloved parable of return in all of Scripture was told by a Jew, to Jews, in a form they would have recognized instantly: the prodigal son (Luke 15). A son turns his back, walks into the far country, wastes everything, and comes to himself in the pig-yard. And then he turns. I will arise and go to my father — that is teshuvah, in narrative form, complete with the resolve and the confession he rehearses on the road. The parable could be lifted whole into a treatise of Maimonides. But notice the detail Jesus adds, the detail that is the whole gospel: when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him (Luke 15:20). The son’s turning is real and necessary — there is no embrace if he does not arise and go. But the son’s turning is not what produces the robe, the ring, the shoes, and the fatted calf. The Father provides the feast. The Father runs. The return is the son’s; the restoration is the Father’s gift. That is the exact shape of the whole disagreement, told as a story, with the Jewish doctrine of return fully honored and the Christian conviction about who pays for the feast fully present.

And here, finally, is where Lamentations 5:21 comes home. Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned. The deepest Christian claim is that teshuvah and atonement are not two separate transactions that the sinner must somehow coordinate, but two things that meet in one Person. In Christ, the perfect teshuvah — a complete human life turned wholly and without remainder toward the Father — and the perfect atonement — the offering that covers — are united in a single man, who is also the God being returned to. He is both the One who turns perfectly toward the Father on our behalf and the offering that makes the turning land. And the grace that the synagogue prays for every time it returns the scroll to the ark — turn thou us, and we shall be turned — is, in the gospel, answered: God turns us, by his Spirit, so that we can turn; he goes before the will so that the will can come home. The turning is still ours. It was always also his gift.

VII. The geometry of return: teshuvah in the fellowship’s own frame

I said at the start to hold the geometry in mind, and now I can say why.

The fellowship’s foundational conviction is that God is everything — that nothing that exists that is not of God, from God, in God, sustained by God. In him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) is not poetry but ontology. And our account of evil follows from it: evil has no independent existence of its own; it is the rejection of God’s nature by a free creature — a turning of the conscious will away from the Real toward a nothing it mistakes for something. Sin, in our framework, is self-exile — the will pointing itself away from the Ground of its own being, attempting to stand on its own where there is no ground but God.

Look at that picture and then look at teshuvah, and you will see they are the same picture. Sin is the will turned away from God. Teshuvah is the will turned back. The Hebrew word means exactly the movement our ontology describes: shuv, the return of the conscious agent to alignment with the One in whom it has its being. Teshuvah is, for the fellowship, simply the native Hebrew name for what we mean by returning to alignment with the Absolute Standard — the reorientation of a will that had pointed itself into self-chosen exile back toward the only direction in which life exists.

This is why the seven perspectives map onto it so cleanly. Perspective three holds that evil is the rejection of God’s nature; perspective five holds that to love God is to live as God, embodying his nature. Teshuvah is the entire arc between them — the turning that carries a soul from the first back toward the second. And perspective four, present-tense living, is Ezekiel’s exact insistence: turn ye, turn ye . . . for why will ye die? The door is open now, the kingdom is at hand now, the return is available in the present tense to anyone who will arise and go.

So the fellowship does not engage teshuvah as a foreign doctrine to be corrected. We recognize it as our own subject, spoken in the mother tongue of the faith from which our own Lord came. We disagree with our Jewish friends about one thing only: not whether the will must turn — it must — but whether the turning, by itself, settles the account that the turning-away opened, or whether God must provide the covering that the soul cannot provide for itself. On that one question, we hold the second answer. On everything else about teshuvah, we are students of a tradition that has thought about the return of the soul to God long and deeply.

VIII. The fellowship’s posture

How, then, does the fellowship hold this?

First, with admiration before disagreement. Teshuvah is one of the most beautiful doctrines in any religion, and the rabbinic tradition has developed it with a seriousness and a tenderness that should put casual Christian repentance to shame. The Christian who learns that the penitent stands higher than the never-fallen, who learns Maimonides’ standard of complete return, who learns that God prepared the way home before he made the world — that Christian has been given a gift by the Jewish tradition, and should say so.

Second, with precision about the disagreement. The disagreement is not “works versus grace,” and any Christian who frames it that way has slandered both his neighbor and his own faith — for the gospel begins with the command to turn, and Judaism has always known that God turns the heart before the heart can turn. The disagreement is the narrow and real question of whether the subjective turning reaches the objective guilt, or whether God must provide a covering the sinner cannot generate. State the disagreement that narrowly, and it stays honest.

Third, with the recognition that this is, in the end, the same disagreement that the June 8 essay located at the foundation. Whether teshuvah suffices and whether Jesus is the Messiah are not two questions but one, asked from two directions. If God has provided the final atonement in Christ, then teshuvah is the turning that brings the soul to that provision and is completed there. If he has not, then teshuvah carries the whole weight alone, and the rabbis after the Temple were right to rest the whole house on it. The fellowship believes the first, on the same grounds the earlier essay laid out, and holds the belief with respect for those who hold the second.

Fourth, with patience and with Paul. The Jewish people remain, in Paul’s words, beloved for the fathers’ sakes (Romans 11:28), and the God who taught Israel to pray turn thou us, and we shall be turned is faithful to finish what he began. Our task is not to win an argument about teshuvah. Our task is to live the return — to be people visibly turning home, daily, in the present tense, so that the doctrine is not merely defended but seen. The most persuasive thing the fellowship can say about teshuvah is not a sentence. It is a life that keeps turning back toward the light, and a Father who keeps running down the road.

IX. Closing

Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old. — Lamentations 5:21

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. — Luke 15:20

Teshuvah is the turning toward home. The fellowship holds it as a glory of the tradition out of which our own faith was born, and holds with our Jewish friends that the will must turn, that God desires the return, that the door is open in the present tense to anyone who will arise and go. We differ on one thing: whether the turning, alone, settles what the turning-away broke, or whether the Father provides the feast that the returning son could never have bought. We believe the Father provides it — that he ran down the road in the person of his Son, and that the same God who commands the turning is the One who, going before us, first turns us so that we can be turned.

On that conviction we rest. We hold it with respect for those who do not share it, with gratitude to the tradition that taught the world to call repentance coming home, and with the patience of people who trust that the God who began this work will complete it — in us, and in all Israel, in his own time.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38

260610 – Extraterrestrials as False Gods

by Thomas Abshier | Jun 10, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Looking Up for a Savior: Extraterrestrials, the Substitute Mythology, and the Higher Mind Who Already Came Down

Fellowship Discussion Essay | June 10, 2026

Many Ruminations on Extraterrestrials as Related to Religion

Occasion. Sidney Secular’s recent News With Views essay takes up a subject that the year’s Congressional hearings and the spring’s government disclosures have dragged out of the science-fiction aisle and into the evening news: the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and what it would mean for the faith. It is a careful and fair-minded survey — it walks through Aquinas and Rahner and Jaki and the Jesuit astronomers, it lays out the genuinely hard questions honestly, and it lands in exactly the right place, on the apostle’s instruction to test the spirits (1 John 4:1) and the conviction that whatever may or may not be out there, the truth never leads away from Christ. I want to engage it, not to correct it, but because buried two-thirds of the way down Secular’s essay is a single diagnosis that I think is the most important sentence in the piece — more important than the aliens — and it is the diagnosis that the Renaissance Ministries frame is built to answer. So I will affirm what the essay sees, add what I think the substrate view of reality contributes, walk carefully through the question Secular is most honest about — redemption across creation — and then come back to that buried sentence, because it is the whole point.

I. The cosmos was never empty: what the headline gets wrong about the faith

Begin with the thing Secular sees clearly and most commentators miss. The breathless headline — what if we are not alone? — was never a problem for the biblical worldview, because the Bible has never taught that we were alone. Judaism and Christianity have always confessed a cosmos densely populated with rational, powerful, non-human created minds. We call them angels and demons. Secular rightly reaches back to the strange passage behind Noah’s flood — the sons of God and the daughters of men and the Nephilim born of that union (Genesis 6) — and the fellowship has been working this same seam in the divine-council texts, where the nations are apportioned among the sons of God (Deuteronomy 32:8). The point is simple and steadying: a believer who has read his Bible is the last person who should be rattled by the suggestion that the universe contains minds other than ours. He has believed that all along. The shock that secular culture feels at the possibility of other intelligences is the shock of a worldview that had quietly assumed humanity was the only mind in a dead cosmos — and that is the materialist’s assumption, not the Christian’s.

So the genuinely new question is narrower than the headline. It is not are there other minds — Scripture says yes. It is: are there other embodied, physical, biological rational species, arising on other worlds, possibly fallen and possibly not; and if so, how does the redemption accomplished on this planet relate to them? That is a real and interesting question, and Secular is exactly right that the Bible issues no dogma on it. There is no settled doctrine, no pronouncement, not even an off-the-cuff speculation. Hold that fact; it governs the whole posture I will argue for.

II. The line that matters is not biological — it is spiritual

Here is what the substrate view of reality — Conscious Point Physics, and the theology that rides on it — contributes to the conversation, and it reframes the whole question. The materialist asks the ET question biologically: is there carbon-based life elsewhere; are we biologically unique; will we find a second genesis? But on the view that reality is, at bottom, conscious points sustained moment by moment by the mind of God — that this world is God’s mind we are walking in — the ontologically decisive line in the universe is not biological at all. It is not earthling versus alien, not carbon versus silicon, not human versus grey or nordic or mantis. The decisive line is Creator versus creature, and then, within the order of creatures, aligned with God versus fallen away from him.

Run any candidate being through that filter and watch what happens. A conscious mind that arose on a world we will never see is still, on this view, a creature of wholly derivative existence — it did not make itself, it cannot hold itself in being for one instant, it is sustained by the same divine consciousness that sustains us, and it is accountable to the same Author. In him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) is not a statement about Earth. It is a statement about being as such. So the extraterrestrial, if he exists, does not stand outside the house of God’s creation looking in. He stands in a room of it we had not yet seen. The playground the fellowship has been describing — existence as the ground, infinity as the edge, and the Maker’s rules in between — is as wide as creation, and the rules are the same in every room because the Master is the same.

This is why the Christian, of all people, can meet the prospect of cosmic company with peace rather than vertigo. Discovering minds on other worlds would not unseat God any more than discovering a new continent of humans unseated him. It would not break the frame. It would enlarge the chorus. The God who is troubled by the discovery of more creatures was always too small to be God.

III. The honest hard question: redemption across creation

Secular is most honest, and most worth engaging, where he lays out the genuinely difficult question: if there are other fallen rational creatures, how does Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection relate to them? He gives the three live possibilities, and they are the right three — that such beings may never have fallen and so need no redemption; that Christ’s one earthly work carries a cosmic, universal significance; or that God relates to other rational creatures in saving ways we simply do not understand. And he notes the theologians honestly: Funes raising the possibility of unfallen species exempt from redemption; the strong Catholic insistence that the cross was definitive and once-for-all; Aquinas allowing that the infinite divine person could in principle assume more than one created nature; Rahner entertaining multiple incarnations while holding to the finality of the redemptive work.

I am not going to pretend to settle what the apostles did not address and the Church has never defined. But I will say where I think the weight of the revealed word leans, and then mark clearly the line past which we should not go.

What is revealed is that the second Person of the Trinity is the one through whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together — by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth… all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist (Colossians 1:16–17); all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:3). If that is true — and it is the most cosmic claim in Scripture — then there is no world, seen or unseen, whose existence is not already referred to Christ as its source and its sustainer. On that ground, the cosmic-significance reading is the natural one: the cross is not a local event on a minor planet but the hinge of the whole created order, because the One who hung on it is the One in whom every world, including any world of fallen strangers, already lives and moves and has its being. The blood that reconciles reconciles all things, whether things in earth, or things in heaven (Colossians 1:20). I lean there, and I lean there hard.

But I hold it open, on purpose, because here we are squarely in the territory the fellowship has learned to name with one verse: The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us (Deuteronomy 29:29). Whether God, in his freedom, has dealt with other fallen creatures through the Earth’s one cross, or through some incarnation we cannot imagine, or in a manner that has no analogy in our experience at all — that is a secret thing. Aquinas was right not to put limits on the divine power; the Word’s infinity cannot be fenced inside anything created. So the disciplined posture is the one Secular’s own sources model at their best: affirm without flinching what is revealed — that Christ is the cosmic center, the Word through whom all worlds were made — and decline, just as firmly, to manufacture a doctrine where God has given none. A Renaissance Ministries that respects its own grammar will have a robust Christology of creation and no “doctrine of aliens” whatsoever.

IV. Test the spirits — and notice the test cuts both ways

Secular’s governing principle is the right one, and it is the apostle’s: Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God (1 John 4:1). And he fairly reports the exorcists — Martins, Ripperger, the Orthodox monk Seraphim Rose, and Msgr. Rossetti, whose removal occasions the essay’s post scriptum — who suspect that many alleged alien encounters are not visitations from other planets but spiritual deceptions. I want to grant immediately that this suspicion has serious biblical grounding. Scripture is not naive about non-human intelligences that lie: Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), and our wrestling is against principalities… powers… spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12). A being that presents itself with superhuman capabilities and offers revelation, enlightenment, or salvation is precisely the sort of thing the New Testament tells us to scrutinize rather than to trust on sight. The deception thesis is not paranoia; it is apostolic caution.

But notice — and Secular himself flags this, gently, with his line about seeing the devil in everything one dislikes, as in the days of the witch hunts — that the test cuts both ways. Test the spirits is not only a license to suspect; it is also a discipline against over-claiming. The Notre Dame theologian quoted in the Times report puts his finger on the second error exactly: the danger of taking one’s private discernment and presenting it as something the faithful are bound to accept, as settled teaching, when the Church has defined nothing of the kind. That is the same error the fellowship has been naming all season under a different heading — the error of elevating a private revelation above the standard of the revealed word, the temptation Leonard and I went round and round about with the Book of Mormon. It is the Berean instinct that corrects it in both directions: the noble Bereans tested even an apostle against the Scriptures (Acts 17:11), and they tested in order neither to believe too quickly nor to dismiss too quickly.

So I will not adjudicate the dispute between the cardinal and the exorcist — that is an internal matter of Catholic governance, and there is a defensible instinct on each side. The exorcist’s instinct that real deception is afoot is biblically sound. The bishop’s and the theologian’s instinct that one must not bind consciences with private speculation dressed as doctrine is also biblically sound. Both are applications of test the spirits. What the episode illustrates, for our purposes, is that the discernment Scripture commands is a two-edged blade: test the phenomenon against Christ — does it lead toward him or away? — and test your own interpretation of the phenomenon against the revealed word, lest your zeal outrun what God has actually said. The standard in both directions is Christological. Anything, from the sky or from the pulpit, that draws the soul away from Christ and the word fails the test, whatever its costume.

V. The buried sentence: the substitute mythology

Now to the most important thing in Secular’s essay, which is not about aliens at all. He records Stanley Jaki’s warning — and Seraphim Rose’s, and his own — that the obsession with extraterrestrials functions, for a secular culture, as a substitute mythology: that a civilization estranged from revelation and transcendence will reach for the sky to fill the vacuum where God used to be, and that many dream of extraterrestrials because they are afraid to be alone. Secular says it plainly: for a culture devoid of a personal God and an objective moral order, aliens easily become a surrogate religion promising revelation, enlightenment, and salvation from some source.

That sentence is the whole game, and it is the same diagnosis the fellowship has been writing all week under the name of the sea change in meaning. It is the same shape as the attention economy strip-mining a culture whose attention is anchored to nothing; the same shape as a generation that will not labor to learn because the horizon has collapsed to the grave. A people does not stop being religious when it stops believing in God. It becomes religious about something else. The hunger does not die; it migrates. And so a civilization that has evicted the Creator finds itself scanning the heavens for a higher intelligence to descend and disclose the meaning of it all, to tell us we are not alone, to save us from ourselves — which is to say, it finds itself aching, in a secular disguise, for exactly the thing it threw out.

The hunger itself is not the error. The hunger is holy. He hath set the world — eternity — in their heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11); the heart is restless, as Augustine said, until it rests in God. The longing for transcendence, for ultimate meaning, for communion beyond ourselves is the truest thing about us, the God-shaped space that proves whose we are. The error is only in the aim. To take that holy hunger and point it at the created sky — to look up, at the cosmos, for the salvation that comes only from the cosmos’s Maker — is the oldest mistake in the book: they worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator (Romans 1:25). The UFO is not, at root, an astronomy story or even a demonology story. It is a theology story. It is what the God-shaped longing does when it has nowhere sanctioned to go.

And that reframes the entire question for a ministry. The point is not, finally, to win the argument about what is in the released footage. The point is to recognize the disclosure-seekers as people doing a religious thing badly, and to tell them the news they are actually starving for: the higher Mind they are scanning the heavens for has already broken in. He did not arrive as a craft in the sky. He arrived as a child in a manger. The disclosure the disclosure-hunters long for already happened, and its content is a Person. We were never alone — not because the greys are real, but because the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. They are looking up for a savior to come down. One already did.

VI. The honest accounting

Let me mark the guardrails, briefly, so the fellowship holds this rightly. First, no doctrine of aliens. Where Scripture is silent we stay silent; we hold the redemption-across-creation question with Deuteronomy 29:29 humility and refuse to do, in our direction, the very thing the Notre Dame theologian warned the exorcist against — turning speculation into a teaching. Second, no naïveté. The deception thesis is biblically serious; we test the spirits, and we do not hand our trust to any voice, from the sky or otherwise, that leads away from Christ. Third, no distraction. Because the phenomenon is, for our purposes, mostly a lens onto the meaning-crisis, we do not let the spectacle pull the ministry off mission into UFO apologetics; the real work is the same work it always was — to fill the vacuum the surrogate mythologies are rushing into. And fourth, keep the wonder. The instinct the new pope voiced, of a mysterious joy in studying the universe, is the right one: a larger cosmos is a larger occasion for awe at its Author, not a threat to him. The heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1); when I consider thy heavens… what is man, that thou art mindful of him? (Psalm 8:3–4). Wonder, not fear. Discernment, not credulity. Humility, not dogma.

Closing

Secular ends exactly where he should, and I can only agree: whatever may or may not exist out there, authentic truth will never lead away from Christ; test the spirits. I would add only the turn that the substrate view and this season’s work make available. The men watching the released footage and the men reading the exorcist’s books are, underneath their very different conclusions, doing the same human thing — straining toward a higher Mind, afraid to be alone in a cosmos that science told them was empty. The gospel’s answer to both is not first a verdict on the footage. It is an announcement: the cosmos was never empty, the higher Mind is real, he is not far from any one of us, and he has already done the one thing the sky-watchers are waiting for — he came down. The line that matters in this universe was never the line between Earth and the stars. It is the line between the creature and the Creator who made every world there is, and holds them all, this moment, in the palm of his hand.

For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible… and he is before all things, and by him all things consist. — Colossians 1:16–17

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38

260609 – Why Learn, Sacrifice, and Delay Pleasure

by Thomas Abshier | Jun 9, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Perfect Teacher and the Missing Why: AI Education and the Sea Change in Meaning

Fellowship Discussion Essay | June 9, 2026

Occasion. John, Mike sent you Jeffrey Tucker’s recent column on the backlash against the screen, you wrote back a thoughtful pushback, and the thread landed with me. I want to take it up, because you have put your finger on something real, and I agree with your experience that AI is a better teacher than teachers. I think in the space between you and Tucker lies the answer we are searching for. Tucker is sounding an alarm; you are describing a market that will, in time, answer the alarm. You are both arguing about the tool and the mechanism. I want to argue about the student, because that is where the whole question is actually decided. Coincidentally, this is the question I have been working on for the fellowship this week under the rubric of a sea change in meaning.

I. Where we agree, and where Tucker is right

Let me start by conceding the ground you have well taken. The AI tutor is not a marginal improvement on the classroom — it is in a different category. The model most of us were raised on was a cattle drive: sit in a room, listen to one person talk for an hour, maybe ask a question, maybe make it to office hours, do the homework, cram for the midterm, cram for the final, and then let the facts and skills evaporate over the following decades. Against that, an intelligence that stays exactly one step ahead of you, never tires, never loses patience with a slow pass, repeats itself as many times as you need, and adapts to your rate of comprehension, and reinforces in real time — that is not vaudeville against cinema. That is teaching as it was always supposed to be and almost never could be at scale. Your German sessions with Grok are the proof, properly built and properly used, this is the best instruction the human race has had access to.

And yet Tucker is not wrong either. The screen was sold as the thing that would save education, the laptops were wheeled in by the millions, and the result has been a generation less able to read deeply, sit with difficulty, or hold a thought against distraction. Schools are now banning phones and unplugging the very machines that were supposed to deliver the future. Tucker is describing a real wound. So we have two true things on the table that seem to contradict each other: the best teaching tool ever built and a population being harmed by the screens it runs on. The resolution is not to pick a side. It is worth noting that both perspectives are measuring the tool. The tool is not the variable that matters most.

II. The analogy that almost works

Take Elon’s analogy seriously, because it is genuinely good as far as it goes. Entertainment did climb from the local stage to the global screen by sifting out of the whole population of performers. A few world-class talents were found, amplified, and delivered everywhere, and the mediocre local act could not compete. Education, the argument runs, should climb the same ladder: stop making every student sit before whatever instructor the local institution happens to hire, and instead deliver the distilled best teaching on earth, to everyone at once. The promise of AI is exactly that distillation, now personalized.

But watch the seam where the analogy tears, because that seam is the whole essay. Entertainment is received. You sit, and the world-class performance washes over you. The better it is, the less you have to do. Education is the opposite kind of act — it is labored at. The education received by watching is shallow. Deep education is delivered by struggling, by deferring ease, by doing the hard thing until it becomes easy, and then doing the next hard thing. Scaling the quality of delivery does nothing to supply the will to labor — and worse, a lifetime of frictionless, world-class content delivered to a passive recipient may train precisely the habit of passive reception that makes labor feel unbearable. The cinema model, applied naively to education, can manufacture exactly the screen-passive mind Tucker is mourning. The vaudeville-to-cinema ladder solves the supply of teaching. It does not touch the demand for learning, and those are not the same thing.

III. A tool amplifies a will; it cannot create one

Here is the principle the thread is missing: a tool amplifies a will; it cannot create one. The finest tutor ever built, multiplied by a student with no reason/motivation/desire to learn, equals nothing. You can put Grok in front of a young man with no motivation, and he will use it, if he uses it at all, to do the least work for the highest grade, generating the essay he was supposed to write, or entertain himself with the dopamine hits of trivia. After the obligatory/perfunctory essays and learning exercises, he will close his AI-tutor laptop and distract himself with another screen or activity that asks nothing of him and promises pleasure. The tool faithfully amplifies whatever drive/spirit/motivation is fed into it, including the drive to avoid effort. So the live question was never how good the teacher is. It was always why the student would move. Motivation is upstream of the tool, and we have spent the entire debate downstream.

IV. Underneath motivation, the question no one wants to ask

So go upstream. Underneath motivation lies a question that sounds like a teenager’s and is, in fact, the oldest question there is: Why learn? What is the point? And it does not stay a question about education for very long. If we are, as the reigning story has it, evolved from dust and monkeys by chance, headed for nothing, with the curtain coming down at death and no one keeping score, then what, precisely, is the argument for the hard, deferred, effortful business of becoming wise? If the only good on offer is experience, the rational move is to maximize the most reliable, lowest-cost pleasure available in the shortest time, and effortful learning is a poor short-term bet against the feed.

This is not a slur; it is arithmetic. Every act of learning is an act of deferred gratification — a present cost (effort, tedium, difficulty) paid for a future return (capacity, mastery, understanding). Whether deferral is rational depends entirely on the time window: how long the horizon is, and whether the payoff is real within it. Shorten the horizon to the grave and assign zero value past it, and the discount rate on every long-horizon good — wisdom, character, a formed mind, a disciplined soul — goes effectively to infinity. Sacrifice in the present stops paying. And the scripture saw this with perfect clarity two thousand years before behavioral economics gave it a name: if the dead rise not, let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die (1 Corinthians 15:32). Paul is not being cynical. He is being rigorous. If the horizon is the grave, hedonism is the rational policy. The whole book of Ecclesiastes is the experiment run to its end — every pleasure, every work, every acquisition pursued under the sun — and the verdict is vanity, not because the things were bad but because the horizon was too short to make any of them mean anything.

Now I must say the careful thing, because the argument is stronger when honest than overstated. I am not claiming that no unbeliever is motivated, or that atheists do not learn — manifestly many of them learn ferociously, out of love of truth or beauty or duty. My claim is two-fold and narrower. First, those motivations, on a strict dust-and-chance accounting, are borrowed — they are lived on inherited moral capital that the worldview underneath them cannot actually underwrite, the way a man can spend a fortune he has stopped earning. Second, and this is what Tucker is documenting, at the scale of a civilization and across generations, as the capital is spent and the horizon collapses into pure presentism, the motivational base erodes — and you get exactly the drift toward maximal stimulation and away from effortful formation that he is describing. The individual can be better than his creed. Over time, culture cannot be better than its creed for very long.

V. Why the market cannot save us by itself

Which brings me to your synthesis, John — that it is all market-driven, that the present mess is one excessive swing of a pendulum that the discernment of individuals and parents will correct in the fire of competition, the way disciplined people learn to refuse the ever-more-engineered junk food. I think this is right and incomplete in exactly the same way the tutor argument is. The market is a magnificent mechanism. But a market only ever sorts for what people actually want. It is a faithful servant of demand, and it has no opinion of its own about whether the demand is for the German tutor or the slot-machine feed. If what people want, at scale, is maximal near-term stimulation, the market will pour its genius into perfecting the stimulation — and that is precisely what it has done. Your junk-food analogy proves my point rather than yours: notice that the discipline to refuse the junk does not come from the market. The market keeps engineering better junk. The discipline comes from somewhere outside the transaction — from a person who values his health, his body, his life, enough to pay the present cost of refusal. Strip out that valuing, and the market optimizes you straight into obesity, intellectual and physical alike. Discernment is not a market output. It is a moral and metaphysical achievement, and the market cannot manufacture the thing it depends on to self-correct.

You also made a sharp and fair hit — that Tucker, framing the situation as dire to win the eyeballs, is himself a combatant in the very attention war he deplores. He is. But look one layer down at why that war is winnable at all. Attention is harvestable precisely where meaning is absent; a person anchored in a real purpose is poor soil for the click farmer, because his attention is already spoken for. So the attention economy is not merely Tucker’s hypocrisy. It is the meaning-vacuum made visible and monetized — a civilization of unanchored attention being strip-mined because nothing within the people holds their attention in place. The clickbait, the cognitive collapse, and the refusal to learn are not three problems. They are one problem wearing three coats.

VI. The sea change in meaning

So here is the thing I am actually working on, and it is the sibling of the sea change I wrote about earlier this week. That essay argued for a sea change in the plausibility of God — a world in which, because physics has made it implausible to deny, people once again breathe the knowledge that they are made, watched, and accountable. This is its twin: a sea change in meaning, which is simply what follows downstream the moment the horizon extends past the grave.

Watch what happens to every term in the argument when the time window opens. Deferral becomes rational again, because the payoff is no longer cut off at death — the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18), and present labor is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory (2 Corinthians 4:17). Learning stops being a bet against the feed and becomes the cultivation of a soul that does not stop existing — loving God with all your mind is not a metaphor but an instruction, and the disciplined mind is treasure laid up where moth and rust do not corrupt (Matthew 6:19–21). Sacrifice becomes investment. Discipline becomes formation. And the student who has absorbed that he is not dust-and-chance but a made and known being of/from the very essence of his creator — that in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28), that he is seen whether or not anyone is looking, that what he becomes matters past his last breath — that student has a reason to move. And each moment is a precious opportunity to lay up treasure in heaven. A student with a vision/frame of reality can reasonably justify the discipline of delayed pleasure and the habit of exerting will in the face of obstacles and present pain. The motivation/drive/fire that rejects sloth and constant pleasure can be nurtured. The conjured image, the expectant feel of reward, can rationalize motivation. Pleasure is the ultimate goal in all cases, but the question is one of justification, choosing the longer/warm/sustainable pleasure over the low effort/dependable/hot rush of drugs, media, and sensual stimulation. Adding motivation to the perfect tutor you rightly praised becomes the most powerful instrument of human flourishing ever built. The tool was never the problem, and it cannot be the solution in isolation. A proper/right/true perspective of reality, in combination with the technical solutions that help overcome/lesson the bite of the curse of entropy, may be the actual solution. Technology/knowledge and wisdom/motivation may be the answer to

VII. The opportunity hiding inside the problem

And here is the hopeful turn, because I do not want to leave you with only a diagnosis. The same channel that can teach a man German one patient step at a time can teach him meaning the same way. The most powerful learning-and-persuasion instrument in history is morally neutral; it will faithfully multiply whatever telos is fed into it. Feed it a civilization that wants to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, and it will optimize the slop. Feed it the conviction that this world is the mind of God we are walking in, that the person is known and accountable and on a trajectory that does not end — and it will carry that to everyone at once, one step ahead, never tiring, exactly as it now carries German. The task is not to fight the tool, and not to wait for the market. The task is to supply the telos — the structure of meaning that turns the amplifier from a strip-mine into a sea change. That is the whole of what I am trying to build.

VIII. The honest accounting

Let me name the limits, the way I have been trying to in all of these, so the case can be trusted. Meaning is necessary but not sufficient — there are plenty of bored believers, and a Christian horizon does not automatically produce a motivated learner any more than it automatically produces a saint. We must not pretend that a metaphysical fix is a technical fix; restoring the why clears the ground and supplies the reason, but the cultivation still has to be done, student by student, with all the ordinary labor intact. The argument is about the grounding and the cultural durability of motivation, not a tidy prediction about any one person’s psychology. And the tool genuinely cuts both ways: the same AI that could carry the sea change could just as efficiently deepen the passivity Tucker mourns, which is exactly why the telos we hand it is not a side question but the only question. Keep me honest on all four of these.

Closing

So I land, John, about where you did — and one floor lower. You are right that the AI teacher is a marvel and that the market and human discernment will, in the fullness of time, hone these offerings in the fire of competition. I am only adding that discernment is itself the fruit of meaning, that meaning is the fruit of a horizon longer than death, and that this is the one input neither the tool nor the market can supply to itself. Ours is to rebuild the horizon — to make it plain again that a human being is a made and watched and never-ending soul, and that the labor of learning is the cultivation of that soul. His is to give the increase. Hand a people that conviction and the perfect teacher you have already found waiting in your German lessons will do the rest of the work it was built for.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? — Mark 8:36

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38

260607 – Christ as the Incarnation of God

by Thomas Abshier | Jun 7, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Creator Takes a Test Drive: On Divine Permission, the Incarnation, and the Conservation of the Soul

Fellowship Discussion Essay | June 7, 2026

Occasion. Peter, you wrote to me this Sunday morning in response to the John 5:19 essay I addressed to Leonard. You did the thing that makes the fellowship worth the labor: you took the verse and ran with it, and you came back with a letter that is itself a small theology. You did not nibble at the edges. You went straight to the hardest questions a serious believer can ask — how the power of evil relates to the sovereignty of God, what it means to say God became a man, how a God who cannot die was dead for three days, what happens to the souls that refuse him, and whether our own words carry more weight than we have been told. I want to answer you the way you wrote to me: directly, by name, and without pretending the questions are easier than they are.

I am going to do something I have not done in a fellowship essay before. I am going to print your letter in full, lightly corrected for spelling so it reads clean, and then take it up move by move. Where you have seen rightly — and you have seen rightly more often than not — I will say so plainly. Where the historic Church has drawn the line in a slightly different place than your letter draws it, I will lay both lines out, give you the reasons the fellowship holds the reading it holds, and trust you to do the discernment yourself, in your own time, the way I trusted Leonard. This is what fellowship is. We think out loud together, and we hold each other to the text.

Peter’s Letter

The following is Peter’s email of June 7, 2026, lightly corrected for spelling and punctuation. The voice and the substance are his.

Hi Thomas,

Happy Sunday!

Of course, it doesn’t seem likely that the creation could ever comprehend its Creator. Thus when Pontius Pilate said to Jesus, “Don’t you know I have the power to execute you?” and Jesus answers Pilate that “unless my Father gave it to you, you would have no power,” that means even the fallen angels, Lucifer, all the satans, the Nachash in the garden, the Nephilim, and even evil people in positions of power are allowed to engage in their malfeasance only by the patience and provision of YHWH himself. In fact, at the Tower of Babel YHWH put all the nations under the power of the fallen angels they insisted on serving and worshiping. So he gave them all over to their gods. But he reserved for himself (YHWH) Abram, who became Abraham — and Abraham’s son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob, who became Israel. This is where the little leaven that leavens the whole lump originates. His law is written on our hearts; he needs no nation-state. It was the “stiff necks” of the Jews who demanded kings.

But this subservience of the evil angels and people is too often overlooked. Christ even had the legion of demons beg him not to send them away, thus making it self-evident that they fully understood their complete powerlessness in the presence of Christ. Yet even the Apostles in the first-century church, who were casting out demons, healing the sick, and raising the dead, and were direct protégés of Christ, never report such groveling obsequiousness from demons. So, clearly, Christ was way above the Apostles and all the demons, and Pilate too. So why would Christ allow himself to be subjected to such incredible suffering and humiliation?

I think of it like this: If I built a sports car from scratch, I would probably want to drive it when finished. I see Jesus as YHWH, the Creator, taking a test drive in his creation. He chose undeserved suffering and death as his paramount and supreme act of solidarity with all of mankind. Nevertheless, when YHWH is in the driver’s seat of one of these mortal coils we inhabit for our trial here on earth and call a body, then we get Jesus, and that is why, if we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father. In other words: Jesus is what YHWH looks like in mortal/human form. It’s not that he isn’t human; it’s just that his consciousness was one with the Father’s — he was directly connected spiritually.

This is why it is so confusing for some of us (me). Jesus had to be all human, since he had to be legally dead in order to rise from the dead, which means dead for three days and three nights under Jewish law. But YHWH is spirit, which can’t be killed; yet Jesus was dead from Wednesday (Passover) at sundown until Saturday at sundown — three days and three nights. But he can’t be God, because God doesn’t die. Yet we say that he was God incarnate. It seems like a contradiction, but that is only because of our misunderstanding and fear of death, which I call our “lingering materialism.”

The resurrection of Jesus points to something much more glorious — and ominous — than merely his resurrection, which was HUGE! The glorious part is that we all get up from the dead at one time (the just and the unjust). It is a natural law of creation. That is the super cool part: we all rise from the dead. The ominous part is that YHWH doesn’t want any psychopaths in heaven. He doesn’t want spirits who have chosen evil (decadence, death, destruction, violence, theft, and the oppression of others) rather than choosing love (edification, life, creativity, compassion, generosity, and the liberation of all mankind) as part of his adopted family FOREVER. Pretty simple, really; even a kindergartner understands this. Who wants jerks in their family? But since in the material world matter-energy can neither be created nor destroyed (modern physics understands this), then…

The Law of Spiritual Conservation of Energy

Because individuated consciousness, too, is part of the material creation, it also can neither be created nor destroyed. Of course, YHWH could end it all at any time. But the material universe he has created operates under laws, which we call natural law. Thus our own spiritual choices are our judgments and our punishments, and are completely self-imposed. This is because the evil spirits and souls are not destroyed. Rather, they are segregated. People who choose Jesus get to go with him. They hear his voice and follow the good shepherd.

BUT those who choose evil get to go with the other spirits and souls who chose evil — but with a special treat, which is that they all get confined to a very small area, so the rest of us can enjoy the creation without their destructiveness, which will still be there, but way over there, in hell. Think of it like a prison with no innocent souls in it, only those who have chosen evil repeatedly, after having multiple chances and possibly multiple lifetimes to repent; only those souls end up in this particular prison. Oh, and there is no warden other than Lucifer himself. Anyone who wants to live there is nuts, and that is why evildoers tend to be materialists who — whether they believe in a God, gods, or the devil — think so little of themselves that they buy the lie that this life is all there is, that this is the only shot at material wealth, fame, and luxury, and that those things are important. This is why it was such a severe curse by YHWH to shorten our lifespans. We can’t pass on our experience and knowledge to the next generation, since by the time they are even curious (age 40–60) we are already dead. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

Conclusion: hell is real (if you believe in the laws of physics), and we all get to choose where we are going after this. It is totally up to us, and requires only that we set aside our egos and merely submit to a higher authority named Jesus. We don’t even have to submit to YHWH — just to Jesus. As Bob Dylan sang, we have “gotta serve somebody.” I ask, who’s it gonna be? I say, if Christ isn’t good enough to be your king, then I sincerely pity you. If he is, then you are my brother.

Love, Peter

* In fact, part of Christ’s message is that we have incredible power that we have been completely deprived of by our own belief in the lies of the enemy. In the beginning was the Word. YHWH spoke the creation into existence. We are to be like Christ, images of the Father in the flesh. What if every word you have ever consciously spoken has been either a blessing or a cursing on your own life? “A man does not defile himself by what goes into his mouth; rather, it is what comes out of his mouth that defiles him.” It is our enemy that tells us our words have no power. But they do — much more power than any of us can imagine. Prayer is not only important because of our supplications for our needs (YHWH knows what we need before we ask), but most especially because in spoken prayer we announce and decree the terms under which we ourselves, our households, and our realms will be governed. We choose God’s laws over man’s law, God’s providence over government allotments, God’s healing over pharmakeia, etc.

I. What you have seen rightly: all power is borrowed

Peter, the first move in your letter is the strongest and ties your letter directly back to the verse Leonard asked about. You begin with Pilate. Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above (John 19:11). You are exactly right about what that verse does. It empties the most powerful man in Judea of any independent authority in the very moment he is feeling most powerful. Pilate thinks he holds Jesus’s life in his hands. Jesus tells him he holds nothing that was not handed to him.

Now watch what that does when you set it beside John 5:19, the verse we just worked through. The Son can do nothing of himself. In the essay to Leonard, I argued that this is not a confession of weakness but a statement of the most intimate unity — the Son does nothing apart from the Father because the Son is never apart from the Father. But your letter adds the mirror image, and it is true. If even the eternal Son acts only in perfect correspondence to the Father, how much more is it the case that nothing in the entire creation can do anything of itself. Pilate cannot. The Nachash cannot. The legion cannot. The whole created order, good and evil alike, runs on borrowed power. The difference between the Son and the creature is not that the creature borrows and the Son does not — it is that the Son’s “borrowing” is the eternal communion of one divine being, while the creature’s borrowing is the radical dependence of a thing that did not have to exist at all.

This is why your reading of evil is sound, and why it matches what the fellowship has been calling “derivative negation.” Evil is not a second kingdom mounting an independent campaign against God. Evil has no power plant of its own. Every watt the enemy spends was first granted, and is still sustained, by the One he spends it against. You put this beautifully with the demons. The legion in the Gerasene country does not negotiate with Christ from strength; they beg (Mark 5:10–12). Thou art come hither to torment us before the time (Matthew 8:29). James says the demons believe in one God and tremble (James 2:19). You are right that this terror is conspicuously absent from the demoniacs the Apostles later confront — the demons resist the servants more boldly than they ever resisted the Master, because the servants carry delegated authority while the Master is the authority. That is a genuine observation, and it is worth keeping.

I will add one note to your Babel passage, because it is better grounded than even you let on. The reading you are reaching for — that at Babel the nations were apportioned to lesser spiritual powers while YHWH kept Israel as his own portion — is not a fringe idea. It is written into the text. In Deuteronomy 32:8–9, the older manuscript tradition preserved in the Septuagint has God dividing the nations according to the number of the sons of God and then taking Jacob as the LORD’s portion. Psalm 82 shows God standing in the divine council, judging the gods (the elohim) to whom the nations were given because they judged unjustly. The Deuteronomy 32 picture is exactly your picture: the nations handed over to the powers they preferred, Israel reserved as the seedbed of the leaven that would eventually leaven the whole lump. You have your hand on real Scripture here, not a private theory.

So the foundation of your letter is solid. Hold onto it. Everything else you wrote is built on the recognition that nothing — not Pilate, not the principalities, not death itself — stands outside the sustaining patience of God. Keep that, because in Section IV, it is going to do some heavy lifting for you, where I am going to ask you to be a little more careful than in your letter.

II. The test drive — and who is in the driver’s seat

Here is the image everyone will remember from your letter, and it is a good one: God built the sports car, and God wanted to drive it. The Incarnation is the Creator’s test drive in his own creation, with undeserved suffering chosen as the supreme act of solidarity with the creatures who have to drive these mortal coils through the trial of a lifetime. There is something deeply right in that, and I do not want my careful qualifications to bury the rightness of it. The eternal God did not stay outside what he made. He came in. He took the worst of it — the betrayal, the scourge, the nails, the godforsaken cry — not because he had to, but as solidarity. We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities (Hebrews 4:15). When you say “if we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father,” you are quoting the Lord himself: he that hath seen me hath seen the Father (John 14:9). That is not your invention. That is the heart of the thing.

So I am with you on the destination. Let me just adjust the steering, because the test-drive image, taken too literally, can slide into two old ditches the Church marked off centuries ago, and I would rather you drive between them than into either one.

The first ditch: who is driving? Your letter says, “when YHWH is in the driver’s seat… then we get Jesus,” and “his consciousness was one with the Father’s.” I know what you mean, and what you mean is true. But the precise way the essay on John 5:19 framed it matters here. It is not the Father who climbed into the car. It is the Son. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are not three masks the one God wears in turn — that is the ancient error called modalism, and the Church rejected it because it makes the cross incoherent (to whom is Jesus praying in Gethsemane, if the Father just is Jesus under another name?). The Son is the one who is eternally from the Father, eternally distinct in person while identical in being. When you say Jesus’s consciousness was one with the Father’s, the orthodox way to put it is the one I gave Leonard: perichoresis, the mutual indwelling of the persons. The Son’s life is the Father’s life lived from the Son’s side. So — yes, perfect unity of will and consciousness. But it is the unity of two who are genuinely distinct, not the collapse of the two into one driver wearing a human suit. Keep the persons distinct and the test drive holds. Collapse them, and you lose the Gospel of John, where the Son speaks to the Father, is sent by the Father, and returns to the Father.

The second ditch: what is being driven. A test driver is not the car. He sits in it, works the controls, and gets out at the end. If we press the image, Jesus’s humanity becomes a vehicle the divine consciousness operates from the outside — a costume, an avatar, a remote-controlled body with no human mind of its own. The Church rejected that, too. It has a name — Apollinarianism — and the answer the fathers gave is the one that protects everything you care about. The Son did not drive a human body. He became a complete human being: body, soul, mind, and will. The Word was made flesh (John 1:14) — made it, not merely wore it. This is the hypostatic union defined at Chalcedon in 451, the doctrine I leaned on for Leonard: one person, two natures, neither confused nor separated. It is why Gethsemane is real. Not my will, but thine, be done (Luke 22:42) is a true human will, genuinely afraid, genuinely surrendering — not the Father talking to himself through a puppet. If Jesus only looked human, then his solidarity with us, the very thing your letter rightly exalts, evaporates. He can only stand with us all the way down if he came all the way down — into a real human nature, not into a driver’s seat he could step out of.

So I would put your image this way, with the steering corrected: the Son — eternally distinct from the Father, eternally one with him in being — did not test-drive a body. He took the whole car into himself and became a driver who is also, fully and forever, the car. That is a stranger and more wonderful thing than a test drive. It is the Maker becoming the made, without ceasing to be the Maker. And it is the only version of the story in which “he chose undeserved suffering as solidarity with all mankind” is actually true, because only a real man can really suffer.

III. How a God who cannot die was dead

This is the knot you named most honestly: he had to be all human, since he had to be legally dead… but he can’t be God, because God doesn’t die. Yet we say he was God incarnate. It seems like a contradiction. Peter, you are feeling the exact pressure the Church felt for four centuries, and your instinct about the resolution is half-right. Let me give you the other half.

Your half: the contradiction is partly an artifact of “lingering materialism” — the assumption that death is annihilation, the snuffing-out of a being into nothing. On that assumption, “God died” would indeed mean “God stopped existing,” which is impossible. You are right to reject that. Death in the biblical frame is not annihilation; it is separation — the soul from the body, and in the worst case, the person from God. So the resurrection is not God re-creating a Jesus who had blinked out of existence. The person never went out of existence at all.

But here is the half your letter does not yet have, and it is the half that dissolves the contradiction cleanly. The resolution is the two natures of Section II. The one person of Christ has two natures, divine and human. Death belongs to him according to his human nature — a real human body really stopped, a real human soul really departed it. The divine nature did not and cannot die; God remains impassible and immortal in his deity. But — and this is the move the fathers made, called the communicatio idiomatum, the communication of properties — because the two natures belong to one and the same person, what is true of either nature can be said truly of the person. So we are permitted to say, and Scripture does say, that God purchased the church with his own blood (Acts 20:28). Not because the divine nature has blood or veins, but because the person who bled is God. The subject who died on that cross is divine. The dying happened in his humanity. Both halves are true at once, and they do not collide, because they are predicated of one person through two natures.

So you can keep “God incarnate was dead for three days” without contradiction. The person who was dead is God. What died in him was his humanity. What could not die — his deity — is precisely what guaranteed that death could not hold him. It was not possible that he should be holden of it (Acts 2:24).

On the calendar — Wednesday-at-sundown to Saturday-at-sundown, to fit a literal three days and three nights against Matthew 12:40 — I will only say this: it is a real position, held by careful people, and I am not going to relitigate the chronology here, because the theological core stands on either the Wednesday reckoning or the traditional Friday one. Whether the tomb held him seventy-two hours or something less, the thing that matters is the thing you already have: he was truly dead, and he truly rose. The fellowship does not need to settle the calendar to confess the Creed.

IV. The conservation of the soul — and the one place I would have you be careful

Now, your “Law of Spiritual Conservation of Energy,” which is the most original thing in your letter and the place where you and I, as a physicist-physician and a lawyer arguing theology, get to enjoy ourselves. Your intuition: matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed; individuated consciousness is part of the creation; therefore, consciousness too is conserved — souls are not annihilated, only sorted. I think the intuition is largely right, and for a reason that ties straight into the verse Leonard asked about. But it needs one anchor bolted down, and to your great credit, you bolted it down yourself, in a single sentence most people would have skipped.

The anchor is this. The conservation of the soul is not a brute metaphysical fact that stands over God. It is God’s ongoing act. The reason a created person cannot fall out of existence is that the same God who spoke him into being holds him in being, moment by moment. This is the precise teaching of John 5:26, the verse at the center of the discourse we walked: as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself. Only God has life in himself — that is the divine attribute the tradition calls aseity, self-existence, life that depends on nothing. The Son has it by eternal gift from the Father. And the creature? The creature never has life in itself. The creature has life on loan, sustained from outside, every instant. So consciousness is conserved — but it is conserved the way a note is conserved as long as the singer keeps singing it, not the way a rock sits in a field. In him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28), which I keep returning to because it keeps being the answer.

And here is why I say you bolted the anchor down yourself: in the middle of your conservation law, you wrote, “Of course, YHWH could end it all at any time.” That one clause is the whole orthodox correction, and you supplied it. It means you are not claiming the soul is a little uncreated, self-existent god that God is powerless to unmake. You are claiming the soul persists because God has ordained that it persist — that the conservation is a law of the creation, which means it is a standing decision of the Lawgiver, not a chain on his wrists. That is exactly right, and it is exactly the CPP picture. The Conscious Points are not eternal sovereigns. They persist because the divine consciousness sustains them, Moment by Moment, in their Perceive-Compute-Displace cycle. Conservation, in physics and in the soul alike, is God’s faithfulness expressed as regularity. Take away the sustaining, and there is no law left to conserve anything.

Now, the one place I will ask you to slow down. In describing the sorting of souls, you wrote that the lost end up where they are “after having multiple chances and possibly multiple lifetimes to repent.” Peter, I want to name this the way I named the Mormon reading for Leonard — laying the two lines side by side, giving you the fellowship’s reasons, and leaving the discernment to you. The historic, Nicene-orthodox tradition the fellowship works within has read Hebrews 9:27 as the boundary on this question: it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. One mortal life, then judgment — not a series of return trips through the body to keep trying. The reincarnation strand has had its Christian sympathizers here and there across the centuries, but the mainstream of the tradition — the same tradition that gave us the two-natures answer in Section III and the perichoresis answer in Section II — set it aside, and for what I take to be a sound reason: the whole weight of the New Testament’s urgency depends on this life being the arena of decision. Now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 6:2). If there were always another lap, the cross would not be the hinge of history; it would be one more option on an endless menu. I am not going to argue it past that. I am only telling you where the fellowship stands and why, and trusting you, as I trusted Leonard, to weigh it on your own.

Everything else in your conservation law, I am glad to keep. The dead rise — all of them, just and unjust — and that is not your speculation either. It is the climax of the very discourse Leonard’s verse opened. All that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation (John 5:28–29). You arrived, by your own road, at the exact verses I walked for Leonard. The just and the unjust both rise. The sorting is real. The conservation holds. You have the structure right.

V. Hell as the prison with the doors locked on the inside

Your picture of hell — segregation rather than active torture, a confinement of those who chose evil so the rest of creation can be enjoyed without their destructiveness, “no warden other than Lucifer himself,” the judgment self-imposed — is more defensible within orthodoxy than you may realize. It is close to the reading C. S. Lewis gave when he said the doors of hell are locked on the inside, that hell is God in the end, honoring a creature’s settled refusal of him, giving the soul forever what it insisted on having: itself, without God, in the company of others who chose the same. Thy will be done, said two ways — by the saints to God, and by the damned to themselves. On that reading, the misery of hell is not a torturer’s invention; it is what the absence of God is, experienced by a being made for him. Your “self-imposed judgment” is in the neighborhood of a serious and humane strand of the tradition.

I would only round it out, so you are holding the whole counsel of Scripture and not just the part that is most congenial. The Bible also uses the harder, more active imagery — fire, the worm that dieth not, weeping and gnashing of teeth, the wrath to come. The mature tradition has generally held that the gentle picture (self-exclusion, the absence of God, the prison locked from within) and the severe picture (judgment, fire, wrath) are the same reality described from two sides — what the lost experience as the natural consequence of their own choice is, at the same time and not by contradiction, the just judgment of a holy God. Hold both. The self-exclusion reading keeps you from making God a sadist; the judgment reading keeps you from making sin trivial. Your letter has the first and could use a little of the second.

And let me affirm the pastoral spine of this section, because it is the right spine: nobody is dragged to that prison who did not, repeatedly and finally, choose the road to it. Who wants jerks in their family? is a kindergarten way of saying something the prophets and the apostles say in their own register — that love cannot be coerced, that a heaven full of the unwilling would be no heaven, and that the God who is love will not violate the freedom that makes love possible. That is sound.

VI. The power of the word — and a caution against making the tongue a magic wand

Your footnote is, to me, the most interesting part of the whole letter, and it deserves more than a footnote. In the beginning was the Word. God spoke, and it was. We are made in his image, and you are asking whether the image carries the power — whether our words are blessings and cursings on our own lives, whether prayer is not only petition but decree. The biblical witness behind you here is strong, and you should not let anyone talk you out of it. Death and life are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21). James spends a whole chapter on the tongue as a fire, a rudder, a thing that no man can fully tame (James 3). And you have the Lord’s own word exactly right: not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man (Matthew 15:11). Words are not weightless. The God who is Word made word-bearers, and what we say does work in the world and in us.

Here is the caution: it is the same as Section I, but with a new key. The power of our word is derivative, exactly the way Pilate’s authority and the demons’ strength and the soul’s persistence are derivative. Our words have power when they are spoken in agreement with God’s word — when our “let there be” is an amen to his “let there be.” There is a counterfeit of this teaching loose in the church, the name-it-and-claim-it strand that treats the tongue as a wand and faith as a force that bends reality to the speaker’s will. That version makes me the little creator and reduces God to the power supply I draw on by speaking the right formula. That is the Pilate error turned inward: forgetting that the power was given from above. The true version — the one your footnote is actually reaching for — is covenantal, not magical. When you say prayer is the place where we announce and decree the terms under which our households and realms will be governed, the deep truth in that is the declaration of allegiance: in spoken prayer, I confess whose I am, under whose law I live, by whose providence I am fed, by whose hand I am healed. The decree has power because it aligns me with the Word who already spoke, not because my larynx is a lever on the universe. Keep the power; locate the source outside yourself; and you are on solid ground.

One small flag on “pharmakeia,” since you reached for the Greek. The word does carry the sense of sorcery and idolatrous drug-craft in places like Galatians 5:20 and Revelation 18:23, and there is a real prophetic warning in it about a culture that medicates its way around God. But the etymology should be held lightly. Luke, who wrote a quarter of the New Testament, was a physician. The Samaritan poured oil and wine into the wounds. Medicine as such is a mercy, a part of the dominion God gave us over the creation; the sin pharmakeia names is the idolatry — trusting the remedy in the place of God, or using the craft to manipulate and deceive, not the aspirin. Choose God’s healing first and always; receive his providence through whatever means he provides, the physician’s hands included. I say that as the physician in the fellowship, with no contradiction at all to choosing the Great Physician first.

VII. The CPP intersection

A brief closing meditation, the way I closed for Leonard, and held just as lightly. The thread running through your whole letter — through the borrowed power of Section I, the Son’s perfect responsiveness in his human nature in Section II, the soul conserved by God’s sustaining in Section IV — is the same thread that runs through the substrate. In CPP, every Conscious Point, on every Moment, perceives its environment, computes its response, and displaces accordingly. Perceive, compute, displace. It does nothing of itself; it acts only in response to what is given, and it persists only because it is sustained. That is the John 5:19 pattern, read all the way down to the floor of physics, and it is the pattern your letter keeps rediscovering at every level it touches. Pilate, the demons, the soul in the resurrection, the word on our lips — none of them generates its own power; each is a node in a creation that runs entirely on what God gives, and God upholds. The Son’s perfect perceive-compute-displace in the divine life is the source; everything below it is a fainter and more dependent echo of the same shape.

I am not claiming this proves anything theological, any more than I claimed it for Leonard. It is a resonance, not a demonstration. But it is the thing CPP keeps handing me: a picture of a universe in which to live the way you are describing — borrowing all power gratefully from God, speaking in agreement with his Word, refusing the lie that the soul is its own little god — is to live with the grain of how reality is actually built, from the smallest Conscious Point up to the eternal Son. In him we live, and move, and have our being. You have been writing about the grain this whole letter without naming it.

VIII. Closing

Peter, you ended your letter with Dylan’s question — we have got to serve somebody, so who is it going to be? — and with a line I want to give back to you, because it is the truest thing in the whole email: if Christ isn’t good enough to be your king, then I sincerely pity you; if he is, then you are my brother.

You are my brother. We do not agree on every clause — I have asked you to keep the persons of the Trinity distinct where your test drive blurred them, to let the two natures carry the weight of “God died” where your “lingering materialism” carried half of it, to bolt the soul’s conservation to God’s sustaining hand where your law could float free, to leave the lap of “multiple lifetimes” off the track where Hebrews draws the finish line, and to locate the power of your own words outside yourself where the counterfeit teaching would lodge it within. But look at what we agree on. That no power in heaven, earth, or hell is anything but borrowed from God. That the Maker came in and took the worst of it as solidarity with us. That he truly died and truly rose. That the dead all rise, the just and the unjust, and that the sorting is real and the stakes are forever. That a man defiles or blesses himself by what comes out of his mouth. And that the only thing the whole creation is finally asked for is to set the ego down and serve the King.

That is a great deal of agreement for one Sunday morning. The rest is what fellowship is for. We will keep thinking out loud together and holding each other to the text.

And one of the scribes… asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. — Mark 12:28–30

Serve somebody. We have. His name is enough.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – i Chronicles 12:38